Last night, 26-year-old David Wilson became the youngest-ever winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for his piece ‘The Dead Roads’. The five shortlisted stories were all broadcast on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago (which, unfortunately, I missed); but now this year’s Award anthology has been launched, so now we have the chance to read them all. And, over the next couple of days, that’s just what I’m going to do.

First of all, an index:

The tiles above will become links as I review each story — three today, and the remaining two tomorrow. I’ll be working through the shortlist in alphabetical order of author, which means of course that I’ll get to the winner last (which should provide an interesting contrast to the experience of reading last year’s shortlist, where the winner came first alphabetically).

Enough preamble; off we go…

Further links
Podcasts of the shortlisted stories
The Award at BBC Radio 4
The Award at Booktrust
Comma Press, publishers of the anthology